1. Field of the Invention
The disclosures herein generally relate to an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer, an information processing method performed by the information processing apparatus, a program for implementing functions to control the information processing apparatus, and a computer-readable recording medium having such a program embodied therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the rapid spread of computers, it has been becoming general practice to store documents as electronic data while such documents were stored as paper files in the past.
As information processing apparatus having the function to store documents as electronic data, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-25113 discloses an image processing apparatus that detects and extracts image areas inclusive of images and text areas inclusive of character strings from a document (i.e., electronic document), which may be scanned by a scanner or the like and may include images such as drawings, tables, and photographs together with character strings. This information processing apparatus stores the extracted images in memory as search objects, and allows a stored image to be retrieved from the memory by use of an extracted character string as a search query.
Such an information processing apparatus makes it possible to find information needed from a vast amount of information stored as electronic data.
In the related-art information processing apparatus as described above, individual images and texts constituting a document are stored as electronic data. No means is provided for a user to check in what configuration these images and texts are stored. This makes it difficult to manage stored documents.
Further, no means is provided to handle images extracted from documents, which gives rise to a problem in that the reusability is low.
Even if the handling means noted above is provided, it may not be possible to locate detailed information that is necessary to reuse an image when an image (e.g. partial image) extracted from a document is to be copied and pasted onto another document, for example. Further, it may not be possible to identify a person who is currently using the image.
Accordingly, there is a need for a scheme that allows a partial image extracted from a document to be copied and pasted onto another document, and allows meta information corresponding to the original partial image to be referred to, thereby improving the reusability of partial images.